#121 – Matt and Scott Answer Your Questions: Q&A #3

01 Nov #121 – Matt and Scott Answer Your Questions: Q&A #3

Matt and Scott answer your questions in Q&A #3. Listeners submitted questions via email and Instagram and the boys will tackle them over the course of several episodes. They also read some podcast reviews (good and bad) from iTunes.

This week they answer:

Colin asks: What physical, mental, or medical conditions would preclude someone from barbell training? Aortic aneurysm. As Scott says, if you walk normally and can defecate then you’re probably good to go. Matt won’t train anyone with fibromyalgia either.

If a trainee misses a workout in a HLM program, is there anything you can do to avoid messing up the whole week? There’s no shortcut to building the stress necessary to drive the weekly 5RM, so not really. If absolutely necessary you could do the light workout followed immediately by the medium workout, to avoid losing the week. However this is very suboptimal and should only be done as a last resort. Scott mentions adding two more days to your training “week” so that you stretch out the SRA cycle from 7 days to 9 days, but again this is a major compromise.

From Matt B: Why doesn’t Online Great Books read Gilgamesh as part of the reading progression. Isn’t it even older than Homer? Scott gets this question all the time, and the answer is that Gilgamesh has some problems. The main issue with Gilgamesh is that it was lost until 1853. Aristotle doesn’t mention Gilgamesh, neither does Shakespeare. It doesn’t seem to have influenced anyone in the Western canon, therefore it wasn’t part of the actual Great Conversation.

What does a good training log look like? Scott uses FitBot for a video log of his training, but he swears by a paper log too. In his view, a paper log should have the date, the warm-ups and work weights, notes about performance and cues for future workouts. Matt likes to track his bodyweight too.